Ant Financial, finance arm of ecommerce giant Alibaba, has launched a new distributed core banking platform which it hopes will accelerate the digital transformation of financial institutions.

The platform is being launched in partnership with Hoperun Information Technology, a Chinese company which provides solutions related to telematics and device to device communications.

The Distributed Core Banking Platform (DCBP) is designed to help banks and other institutions change their business models to become more customer oriented, as well as helping them with the overall challenges that come with digitalisation.

Core banking, or Centralised Online Real-time Exchange banking, is when customers can access bank accounts and perform transactions from any number of a network of bank branches. Sanat Rao, head of Infosys’ core banking platform Finacle, gave us insight into the concept in this month’s FinTech Magazine.

Liu Weiguang, Vice President, Ant Financial, called the new product a “milestone” for the business and added: “This is just the first of many collaborations that we plan to form with other talented partners that will enable us to provide better technology solutions to the challenges faced by financial institutions.”

Chen Bin, President of Hoperun, said: “This solution will help empower financial institutions to customise new business applications and accelerate their innovations.”